Small businesses often get little attention, especially when it comes to search engines. Of course, how a tiny company can compete with a giant corporation! But what if we told you that it is possible? And the answer to that is local SEO. Having local blogs can become a game-changer for any small business trying to get new leads and paying customers.
Besides, it is an effective way to build a better relationship with your current clients and make them more loyal to your brand. So, what is local search blogging, how to perform it correctly, and who really needs it? These are some of the questions we’ll address in today’s blog.
Table of Contents
What Companies Need Blogs for Local SEO
We want to indicate in advance that the company’s website should exist for some time and have a high “authority” in search engines. This could be a topic for a separate article. Still, if we simplify it, the basic idea is that the site should ideally be 3–5 years old. Besides, it has to be optimized, both on-site and off-site.
You can also start a blog on a newly created website and receive additional customers and income, but you need to understand that promotion will require much more time and money. You can also use other users’ blogs for guest posting to attract visitors and new customers. Getting your blog submitted to reputable websites might not be the easiest task. Still, some of the best ways to create a valuable guest post is to share your experience, reveal some failures and lessons taken from them, or suggest a success story of your customers or you as a brand.
Even though many think that blogs are primarily suitable for those businesses that operate internationally or at least throughout the whole country, it isn’t true. Of course, you can target people from anywhere in the world. Still, even small businesses can benefit from it. And local SEO is what can help you to get particular traffic from a specific location if done right.
To create an efficient SEO-optimized local search blog and attract customers who can become your clients, you have to master some of the search engine optimization practices. In this case, you need to pay special attention to local query optimization. Further, we will guide you on how to do that step-by-step.
How to Optimize a Blog for Local Requests
If you decide to use a blog for local advertising and optimize it for requests from a particular region, you must take several measures.
1. Use Local Events as Info Reasons
If you grew up in a small city, you probably know that feeling when nothing seems to happen around you. In fact, this is not true at all. Even in the smallest city, significant events take place from time to time, such as holidays, the arrival of a celebrity, the celebration of the opening of a kind of institution, or a profile exhibition. You just need to spend a little time studying the sites or regional portals, which you can definitely find in every town.
Use such events as information farms to attract a local audience, especially if you can participate in such events yourself. Your personal business experience should dominate in local content writing. Pay attention to the near-metering events.
For example, experts of the Internet marketing agency can take part in a business conference, make an appropriate announcement, and then report on the company’s website.
2. Study Influential Regional Resources
These don’t have to be portals with a million audience, especially if you have 50,000 people in the entire town. The critical point here is the word “influential.” A news site, a regional portal, and a blogger with at least a few thousand readers can be influential. We just find suitable resources for analysis and start the research process:
- Look for pages with the most outstanding visibility through serpstat.com;
- Watch which articles have the most comments;
- Check whether there is a “popular” section.
You can generate the list of pages through Screaming Frog SEO and select the list of exciting topics, further analyzing their frequency. Yet, this method is unsuitable for news sites since too many pages would be an extra waste of time.
3. Write on Topics That Are Weakly Covered
Most likely, you won’t lack such topics at the local level. The competition from large media is not terrible here; it is oriented mainly on national coverage.
It is not difficult to analyze the needs and understand which topics are poorly covered by competitors. But you need to realize that if contractors on the side are engaged in advance, they will need a consultation with the customer. Understanding the agenda in a particular city and region is necessary.
There are many topics that are equally popular both at the level of the country and in the field. Mostly, we are talking about educational content and articles that bear practical value. Here are a few examples for different niches:
- how to choose a plot for the construction of a house;
- where to start studying programming;
- how to execute documents for registration;
- when and what vaccinations a child needs, etc.
4. Create Content for Low-Frequency Requests With Regional Binding
In many valuable commercial search queries, you can simply add the name of your city and get an interesting topic on the blog and an additional landing page to attract potential customers. After the publication, get the return links to articles from high-quality and relevant sites. It is not necessary but can significantly help in promotion, especially if the niche is competitive. This page explains more about successful link building. Here, we’ll concentrate on content.
The examples are the following:
- How to buy an apartment in Los Angeles without intermediaries;
- The best restaurants in New York with the city views;
- Where to relax outdoors in Tokyo, etc.
Thus, you earn loyalty and recognition among residents. This is a plus to the reputation, the brand’s recognition, and the conversion coefficient.
As we already wrote, developing such topics is not particularly difficult. You can even take some large media projects and go through their pages to find ideas for content, simply replacing the names of other cities in collections with the necessary ones for you.
The best way for local blogs is to write news. That is, you don’t have to come up with anything special, just do regular research of those related to your business. Spreading such publications among your target audience will allow you to form an expert image in your field.
5. Experiment With Content Types
In addition to articles, pictures and videos may be used to meet some needs. Do not neglect any source of referral traffic. And if your video on YouTube is also one of the few, if not the only one the place in the top 10 is practically guaranteed.
So, you will be out of competition with a YouTube channel for regional requests. But it is worth starting with things easier since competent optimization of images in thematic articles on the site for local queries can already become a good source of additional traffic.
What can you do? You can start even with a simple video filming your office routine or production, showing little inner workings. You can develop a sufficient number of videos for rollers, the shooting of which will not require a significant amount of time.
Common Mistakes
First, it is worth forgetting about the practice of generating meaningless SEO articles just for the sake of quantity. Local content can give good returns, but mind the quality of your writing.
The audience that you can acquire is not too big. For you, this means that you cannot afford to lose it. Besides, the variety of possible topics is not extensive enough to approach the creation of articles casually. If your visitors immediately don’t like your content, they are unlikely to return to your web page.
That’s why always attempt to approach both your business processes and your copy with more creativity. Your opportunities are endless – create useful checklists, quizzes, news digests, local event agendas, and anything that might be interesting for your audience. In general, do not be afraid to try something new and measure the results. And don’t be like everyone else, go out of the box and see how people start associating your brand with something cool and fun.
Local SEO isn’t only about concentrating on the technical side. Content is paramount because users search for you and come to you (not the others) to get specific information. So, your communication style should be your primary attention.
Conclusion
The growth of any local blog requires concentration on the goals and a set of specific measures. In this article, we highlighted the main areas of tasks that will help you attract an audience from any particular region. Thanks to these techniques, your blog will start ranking for relevant requests, and you will receive a stream of geo-relevant users.
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